


I'll Never Understand Why I'm Such A Selfish Man

by Marzi



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Missy Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-21 07:02:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18138965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marzi/pseuds/Marzi
Summary: If The Master knew how to do one thing, it was survive. No matter what, they survived. And if Bill Potts was anything, it was one big reminder that those who stood with the Doctor tended not to.





	I'll Never Understand Why I'm Such A Selfish Man

Of course she couldn't regenerate after getting shot in the back. She wasn't dying, she was being preserved. If The Master knew how to do one thing, it was survive. No matter what, they survived. And if Bill Potts was anything, it was one big reminder that those who stood with the Doctor tended not to. Oh no, only those he set his sights on to rescue made it out, and even then, there were exceptions. Like Bill Potts. She'd made sure of that.  
  
The Doctor wasn't here to rescue her anyway, he was here to rehabilitate. Dying in a blaze of pointless defense for one tiny fraction of the squirming mass of humanity-- dying to defend someone, was probably something he would look favorably on. No matter how willing she had been to do it, she couldn't really stay mad at herself for deciding that it was a stupid idea. Maybe a part of her had only agreed to it because she knew she would save herself. The memories would start sinking back in once her timelines diverged. Time Lords, it was handy to have a build in fail safe against paradoxes. Especially when you could break through them and leave little clues for yourself. There was a reason their alphabet was mostly circles.  
  
When the whole place burned, she wondered how the Doctor made it out. How his remaining tag alongs rescued him. Maybe he didn't care about dying because he knew his friends would save him. She only ever had herself at her own back. Once upon a time the two of them might have stood together, but that was a long time ago. Whenever the Doctor announced an age it made her shudder. Their numbers were so different, they had fallen so out of sink. Harmony had never really been their thing, even when they still got along.  
  
When the whole place burned, it was just a reminder that she had suffered worse in the past. This was nothing. This was tapping the stove-top by accident. She had been wholly consumed by flame before, and the Doctor had just stood there and watched. She'd suffered worse than shrapnel and torn clothes and broken bones and burns that didn't even sink down to her tendons. Not to mention she was alive, and that was what was most important. You could do a lot with alive.  
  
When the whole place burned, and she was still there, she laughed. She was alive. She could do a lot with alive.  
  
Of course the Cybermen picked her up eventually, but after negotiating with Daleks it wasn't like they were a difficult lot to manage. They would just try and upgrade her, which was really a bit like turning a supercomputer into an abacus. While they tried to tinker with her brain and foolishly connected her to their network, she used access to their medical equipment to fix her body. Somewhat. Mostly. It was still the same body, no regeneration required. At least the generation ship was still caught up at the edge of that blackhole. This detour wasn't taking up that much time. It wouldn't be any time at all once her vortex manipulator was functional. Which would be after she found it. She could even have the whole Cyberman network slaved to her control by then. Maybe crash the colony ship somewhere nice and get worshiped as a god by the puny humans the Doctor had rescued. That could be fun. Except, it didn't sound fun. Not like it used to.  
  
The Cybermen were still on this ship. Why hadn't the Doctor taken care of them? His big hopeless battle was clearly a success, because the Doctor did that. The Master always came back from the brink of death and the Doctor kept that brink from wiping out his pets. Friends. There was a wobbly line in the middle of all that where things sometimes went wrong. Like Bill. Like the Doctor's children. Like her.....  
  
Well the Doctor had left her with a ship full of Cybermen. She might as well use them. Moving still ached quite a bit, so she made sure to crash as gently as possible. Her vortex manipulator was still... somewhere.  
  
Without that pesky time dilation she blasted her way to the upper decks and scrounged under rocks for the humans she had been willing to die for. Apparently. Maybe she hadn't gone back to stand up and do something the Doctor would approve of. Maybe she had done it because if they died together she would get him all to herself. That was part of why she had stabbed herself in the back. She was never good with sharing, and the Doctor was her friend. It wasn't like she could let herself get in the way of that. What would be the point of killing him if the person next to her took the credit? She would much rather savor the moment.  
  
She found the shiny egg disposable under some rocks with the humans. She let him think she was considering using the Cybermen to murder his little colony so that getting him to come with her would be easier. The Doctor had built his new body and she needed the parts. So she stuck his head on an empty cyber-body, called him Bill a few times to remind him that she was evil, and fixed her vortex manipulator. Well, made a vortex manipulator. She still had no idea where her first one went to.  
  
When she crawled into a cyber-body the Not-Bill-Potts, the Alive-And-Now-Irrelevant-One, asked if it made them twins. She turned off the control to his legs before leaving. The air still hurt her skin, she wasn't about to expose it to the raw energy of the time vortex. She may or may not have been sick in her tin suit, but she was alive and that was what mattered. The Doctor hadn't rescued her, she'd done it herself. She wasn't rehabilitated, she was simply more focused on what she wanted. On what was hers. If that meant leaving Egg-Only-Head-Remaining-With-A-Mostly-Functioning-Cyber-Body-Legs-Not-Included and those colonists on a very nice world--nice for humans even-- and their mostly intact colony ship, now Cyberman free thanks to her, so be it. She got what she wanted. She got what her old self intended when he shot her in the back. She got to live.  
  
She could do a lot with that.

**Author's Note:**

> I had been listening to a lot of Flogging Molly and I am also still very bitter about what happened to Missy, so this happened. It originally had a different ending, but I prefer this one. Also, Simm!Master going off about not standing with the Doctor when literally the last time we saw him he stood with the Doctor against the return of the Time Lords, ugh... you can acknowledge shit that you didn't write Moffat -mutter mutter mutter-


End file.
